House Passes Pro IP Overwhelmingly

from the well-that's-no-good dept

Last week we questioned why Congress seemed to think that the White House should be playing the role of copyright cop. Yet, apparently, the House of Representatives didn't think it was a question worth asking, as it has passed the PRO IP bill by an overwhelming vote, 410 to 10. It seems like our Congressional Representatives felt that, once they got rid of one bad portion of the bill, that the rest of it must be perfectly fine. This bill has a ton of problems, expanding copyright law and the executive branch's authority in ways that are pretty clearly unnecessary. It is, in effect, a bill to prop up the obsolete business model of one particular industry, so it's rather disappointing that our Representatives have rushed through to approve it with little discussion or debate over whether it's even necessary. Either way, it seems unlikely to get much further, as the Justice Department has already come out against the bill, one would hope that even if the Senate approves a version of the bill, the President would veto it.

In the meantime, though, given just how much damage arbitrary expansions of copyright law have done, you would think that Congress would at least want to spend some time exploring the issues before rushing through new laws. Tragically, it seems that entertainment industry lobbyists still have politicians convinced that stronger copyright is naturally "good."

In there!

Them commies are just gettin started, their coming for everything. It's a crying shame, that a nation with so much edgeamacation, can be so retarded. just goes to show any dumbass can be a poletic... an VOTE! Stroke's the word And it won't be gentle, if ya know what I mean.

Write your reps

I just wrote my rep and told her I will not be voting for her in the coming election for the piss poor job her and her colleagues have been doing. Probably not worth the bits it was written in, but hey it's at least something!

Re: A Government

Ever see a TV show called Jericho? It's about an evil US corporation that attempts (mostly successfully) to take out 23 major US cities with nuclear bombs in order to shatter the existing government, and recreate it how they see fit. In essence, the corporation becomes the government, or tries to anyway. Granted, it's just a fictional dooms-day drama, but it does make you wonder just how far some corporations will go to get what they want.

And yet...

Re: Damn Bush!

Unanimous does not mean that all the Democrats WANTED to vote no, but went with supporting the bill... Seems to me neither party brought their brains to work that day. But I think your comment is a bit amiss since both sides were almost 100% for it.

How many of you actually vote?

If you really want to make a difference, then do so.
Remember you can only truly whine, and complain about not getting your way if you actually made an attempt to get it in the first place.
Do you also Whine, Bitch, and Complain about not getting a raise at work when you never asked for one in the first place, or actually improved your work efficiency?
No.
Of course you don't because that would be stupid right?

Re: Re: A Government

copyright

To some extent at least this is asinine. This is only for published works, as far as I can tell, and also makes the assumption that anything not formally published is at best insignificant. The writer who goes along with Emily Dickinson (i.e. "The business of poets is writing poetry"--and then if at all perhaps getting published) would most likely see denial of access to the public as a strike against the writer.http://writing.borngraphics.com/voices.pdf

This isn't to say that publication is against writing. The artistic merits of the referenced ms. aren't the question; access is. It's poetry and free verse to boot so the ordinary reader here probably won't be much interested in it save as an example.
--Glenn

IP inaccurate

Merely as a point of clarification, the name of this bill voted upon by the House (which means it has a long way to go to even be enacted by Congress) is terribly misleading. This is not about "IP" generically. It is specifically about copyrights under federal law and a legally questionable incursion by the federal government into the area of trade secrets, an area that has traditionally been the province of the states as sovereign entities.